Richard Harris, aka the loose forward Frank Machin, was nominated for a Bafta for the role in 1963 but lost out to Dirk Bogarde. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

By nice coincidence, this modest commemorative hurrah to mark the half-century since the publication of the finest British novel about professional sport to be written by an actual professional sportsman coincides with yesterday's naming of Brian Moore as 2010's winner of the William Hill prize for sports book of the year.

In the 50 years since its first appearance in 60s' pre-Christmas bookshops, David Storey's This Sporting Life remains not only the best literary novel by a sportsman, but the only one – and don't all blog with your usual barmy fervour to say I've forgotten the terrific early works of the former jockey Dick Francis (or his copycat ghosted imitators John Francome and Jenny Pitman), but good Dick's stuff sat more easily on the whodunnit shelves than the literary (nor have I forgotten excellent works by such as Barry Hines and Brian Glanville, but neither played professional sport).

This Sporting Life has stood the test of "classic" category; at the time the Guardian staffer and rugby league buff Geoffrey Moorhouse hailed the novel as "unique", adding that "an interest in rugby league is by no means necessary to appreciate this story, any more than a fascination with whaling has ever been vital to an enjoyment of Moby Dick".

Indeed, only this very year, the novelist Caryl Phillips was acclaiming Storey in our books' pages as "the only author who knew what it was like to be raked and stamped on by opponents, and then patronised by the chairman over drinks in the boardroom, so only he could have written such a fiercely authentic account of the hypocrisies of British sporting life".

Storey's own story is worth a novel itself. He's the son of a Yorkshire miner and was a squad member of Leeds RLFC for five years in the 50s to help pay for his further education at London's Slade School of Fine Art. An occasional first-teamer, he was the A-side's regular half-back, taking and giving muddy weekend hits while, in midweek, winning no end of painting prizes and exhibiting with West Riding Arts, the London Group, and the Young Contemporaries.

The novel's uneasy love story of insecure anti-hero tough, Machin, and his world-weary landlady, Mrs Howard, earthily provides harrowing off-field narrative, but it is in the raw sporting passages where the reader can wince at the resonance of uncomfortable truths as in, to take a single example, this touchline gallop by the malcontent, joyless Machin.

"I ran close to a play-the-ball and took the pass," Storey wrote. "I broke into the oblique long-paced run popular with the crowd. I chose the right wing, where the winger, of slighter build, waited for me cautiously, feet astride, nervously crouched … I ran at him and shoved out my left fist. I saw his flash of fear, the two arms pushed out protectively, the silly stagger backwards, the two wounds torn in the turf by his sliding heels. I sensed the shape of the full-back running diagonally to intercept. I brought my knees up higher and concentrated on the line. I shoved my hand at the full-back's head as he came in, and felt the slackening of his arms, and I threw myself forwards."

This Sporting Life was released as a film three years later. Following his vivid down-the-bill supporting roles in Where Eagles Dare and Mutiny on the Bounty, young Irishman Richard Harris to star as Machin proved strikingly fortunate casting by Lindsay Anderson because Harris hailed from Limerick's rugby heartland, where he'd been a star schoolboy player at Crescent College and later won a Munster Cup medal with Garryowen.

In Robert Sellers's unputdownable new book Hellraisers, on the careers of various larger-than-life actors, the author quotes Storey on the first day's shooting of the film at Huddersfield's ground where the cynical local team, hired as extras, waited in a bored, heel-kicking cluster for Harris's entrance.

"They were at the other end of the pitch going, 'Oh, Jesus, look at this flower coming out.' Harris just took one look at them and ran down the whole pitch towards them. And as he ran, he got faster and faster until they suddenly realised with horror that he was going to run right into them, which he eventually did. It was that initial gesture of total physical commitment, indifference and carelessness, that caught the players' admiration and they really took to him in a major way."

For once a film was so faithful to its origins that it even enhanced the original novel's unfading and stimulating quality. Sports book of the half-century, you might even say.